by Boston Teran
Case comes over and takes the needle from the Ferryman. They stare at each other. The wind ripples over the tarp awning, which lifts and bellies like a snake traversing soft ground.
Bob goes to get up. Case stops him. Then she straddles him and sits on his lap.
“What are you doing?” he says.
“One final touch.”
She brings the electric needle up toward his face. He stops her cold, pushes her hands away.
“Not my face.”
“Come on, daddy. You’re gonna be in good company. All my lovers have one.”
Bob sits alone in the cab of the Dakota daubing his cheek with a handkerchief bathed in alcohol. He looks into the rearview mirror. Beneath his left eye, about three quarters of an inch long, are the two wavy parallel lines Case put there. The symbol of the Nile, of the Egyptian god Hapi. The sign of Aquarius. Her month, her mark. With one slight vamp. The top line is black, the bottom line red.
She walks over and leans in the cab. “Time for money.”
He reaches under the seat where he keeps his money belt hidden. He starts to peel out two thousand in bills.
“I need three.”
“ID, two handguns, two shotguns, and a pair of backup handguns … two thousand. That was the deal.”
“Still is.” She leans forward, glances at the Ferryman. He is moving slowly with his dogs. A bottle of tequila hanging from his claw, his fancy Bijan pistol in his hand. The sun is arcing down behind him. Murderous red. The Ferryman has himself a shot of tequila, then begins to fire off into the distance. The dogs go wild on the concussion and begin to leap and squirrel and kick up dust.
“What a piece of work,” says Bob. Then, eyeing Case, “Why the extra grand?”
“He knows.”
Bob stiffens up in his seat. He starts forward. Case puts a hand against his chest.
“You take a walk. Let me deal with him, okay?”
“And if he doesn’t deal?”
“We take his arm and leg. Then we start killing the dogs one at a time. He’ll get the picture.”
“Alright,” says the Ferryman, “let’s put all the friggin’ chitchat into perspective. What are you doin’ here with that sheep?”
Case stands beside the Ferryman looking out toward Furnace Creek. She can make out Bob walking the ruins of the old trailer where Cyrus was raised and then heading on toward the stone chimney. They are all half lost in the falling light. Just incidental pieces of some greater darkening headlands. She takes a roll of bills, twenty hundreds round, and holds them up. The Ferryman hoists his tequila bottle up under his arm and claws the money.
“Well, why you with that sheep? You’re up to something. Syncro-fuckin’-nicity, Case. What were you looking for in the house?”
“See if this math works.” She reaches into her pocket and takes out a folded-up newspaper article about the Via Princessa murder. She flips it open and holds it up against the wind for him to see. “One,” she says. Then she reaches into her other pocket and takes out the snapshot of Lena and holds that up. “Plus one … equals Cyrus.”
“Holy Christ, girl.”
“Twelve … twenty-one … ninety-five. It’s right there in your handiwork.”
“Did you drop through the looking glass or what, Alice?”
“Right through. Bad news, too. They’re humming the same bleak story at both ends of the rabbit hole. I need to find them.”
The Ferryman works the money into his pocket, then gets his claw around Case’s arm. “I don’t give a shit what happens. Not to you. Not to Cyrus. Not to the world. But, you’re just starting to get it together. Do you have a death wish? Screw the sheep. Cyrus, too. He’s just another breed of sheep. I thought you saw through all that bullshit when you split from him. But this … They will leave your ass behind, girl.”
Case reaches into her back pocket, takes out another roll of bills, one thousand round.
Bob has started up the hill toward them. It’s time for the Ferryman to decide. He knows if he doesn’t graciously take the money, things will get a lot less gracious.
He takes the money.
“Where is he?”
“Doin’ rat patrol.”
“And the girl? Was she with him?”
“She was alive two weeks ago. But it wasn’t pretty. And the sheep, Bob Whatever.… Who is he in this?”
“Interested third party,” she says.
“How interested?”
“Blood and bones, baby doll. It’s all crossing-over time.”
While the Ferryman considers what he’s just heard, Bob makes the crest of the hill. He spots the Ferryman slip the cash into his pocket. A funny silence falls over Case and the Ferryman as Bob approaches.
“How we doin’ here?”
“Just talking a little philosophy,” says the Ferryman. He stares at Case. “I believe staying selfish is the key to survival.” He turns to Bob. “What do you think, Bob Whatever?”
Case watches Bob to see how he’ll handle himself.
“I think you don’t give a shit what I think,” says Bob. He looks at Case. “Business taken care of?”
“Taken care of.”
The Ferryman turns and starts to walk out farther along the ridge.
“Well?” Bob asks.
“She was alive two weeks ago.”
Bob’s flesh tightens across his whole face.
“The game is on, Bob Whatever.”
“Cyrus?”
“Cyrus.”
He starts for the truck. She stops him. She points to the old trailer. “That’s where he was raised. Cyrus.”
Bob looks back out into the valley. Only a few last frills of scrubland run with light, the rest is part of yesterday.
“Did you ever hear of the Furnace Creek murder?” she asks.
The last they see of the Ferryman as they drive away, he is standing on a bald plate of rock at the precipice. He is naked now, swigging tequila and firing his pistol into the heart of the sky, his prosthetic arm and leg twitching madly with each shot. A strange seaman on the boat of the wind.
19
“What did the Ferryman mean, rat patrol?”
“It’s a mock on some old TV show,” Case says. “Cyrus goes on down to the border. The desert between Calexico and Yuma. Works as a middleman, picking up drugs brought across the line by wetback mules. Plays army while he’s at it. Gets himself some high-tech equipment, night-vision goggles, the whole trip. Then, most of the boys, the carriers, after the delivery, he sends them to ‘spic heaven,’ as he calls it. Sometimes he kills ’em quick, but sometimes … he makes a kind of game out of it. Other times, some fool out there stumbles onto Cyrus. Some farmer or prospector or hunter. It’s the slaughterhouse after that. Ground up, canned, and delivered.”
“Is that where we’re goin’? Calexico, Yuma?”
“Escondido first. Cyrus has places he shacks at when he’s working the desert. People he gets equipment from. If that’s a bust, we’ll try Bombay Beach out at the Salton Sea.”
They do the hard drive south in the cool dark of the freeway desert. Anxious roadside light waves up through the front windshield, flashing the names of restaurants and service stations that burn out like matches in the rear window as they punch their way along Route 15.
They swing down through Victorville and Apple Valley and Cajon. A template of saloons and transmission shops and billboards parading Roy Rogers’s museum and his stuffed pony, Trigger. A real tribute to chump-change identity.
“What did the Ferryman say about Gabi?”
“How do you mean?”
Bob half whispers, “You know what I mean.”
“Nothing. Just that she was alive when they’d been there.”
“That’s all?”
Case’s eyes remain fixed to the road. “That’s all.”
He suspects she’s lying. Maybe he’s even thankful for it. Maybe.
It takes another two hours between stops for gas and coffee to breach San Diego Count
y. The steady drone of the road behind the Dakota’s stereo lulls them, but all that changes when a road sign squares up for the Escondido exit.
Case turns off the radio. “Just a couple of miles now,” she warns.
Bob slips the Ruger out of his belt and checks the wheel-gun’s ammo. It’s almost eleven. They cruise past weedy vacant lots and tracts of flat-faced homes. At the far end of El Norte Parkway is a trailer park sitting up in brush country. It’s surrounded by a scratchy palisade of cypress and blue oak.
They park the truck in a field about a quarter mile away. They steal through the waist-high grass like tribesmen on a hunt. The moon runs silvery behind the clouds. The night is cool, but both are sweating as they make for the line of trees. Case is starting to feel her stomach seize up on her. She could vomit. She is afraid. It ain’t up to wizards now, or shamans, or even therapists. No one to whisper, Here’s how it goes down, bitch, if you want to do it right …
They wolf in low behind a knot of trunks. Thirty yards ahead there are a few streets’ worth of trailers. They pick up the sound of a television going through a series of station changes and the smell of food being fried. Spots of light from the windows fall in patches on the gravel road and against cars parked in tight alongside the double-wides.
Case points. “Over there. That green double-wide with the porch up on cinder blocks. That’s one of Cyrus’s places.”
Bob looks over to where she points. One light glows behind a brown curtain.
“You think the whole pack of them would bring her here?”
“Maybe,” she says.
“He’d take that kind of chance?”
“There is no such thing as chance to him. You can only take a chance if you’re afraid. If you’re not, chance ain’t nothing. He’d do it for that reason alone.”
Bob wipes the sweat off his neck. “It’s been a long time, right, since you were there.”
“Yeah.”
“The place could be someone else’s by now.”
“We’ll find out pretty soon.”
The rear door of the closest trailer opens. A ransacked-looking excuse of a housewife in a funky pink robe steps out into the dark carrying her garbage. Her German shepherd jumps into the light and scoots around her, his nose working the ground for a spot to piss.
Case and Bob slide down into the cask of the roots so as not to be seen. The dog seems to pick up their smell. He starts barking. His head turns in hard snaps. The woman calls him but he doesn’t move, doesn’t stop. The woman hangs there with a cigarette on the edge of her lips.
Bob can see she’s got the kind of face that’s been wrecked by decades of cocktails and bad attitude, and not one to go along gently. She keeps watching.
Case and Bob huddle there, hardly breathing now. Finally she calls the dog in, and her door closes and the yellow light of the room is swallowed up.
Case goes to sit up, but Bob stops her.
“Hold back a bit,” he says. “She may be watching. She’s the type. Believe me, I’ve been called in by enough like her to know.”
Case nods and sits there.
They huddle up for maybe an hour, giving the old lady’s eyes a chance to get bored. They talk and lay out the moves ahead. Case will play the Little Red Riding Hood part. Knock on the door and see if the Big Bad Wolf is there filing his teeth. If Cyrus is, and if she can clear the door by putting on a good junkie grovel, and if the girl is there or at least if she gets a sense the girl is there, she’ll give Bob one sign. If not, she’ll give him another. Bob will then move accordingly. But each move comes with the promise of blood.
If none of them are there, if there’s just some coolie they got holding down the fort for room and board and a few toots, well, that’s something else altogether. And Bob’ll be given the sign to lay back.
Case is barely an imprint against the green cinder-block walls as she makes her way along the sundeck of the double-wide. She passes the window. A sliver of light seeps from the edges of the drawn curtain, whose ratty corners leave a thin, useless glimpse of the room beyond. There are no voices. Just music. Heavy-edged stuff on the slow side, thrumming from somewhere down a hallway. Case takes a breath, knocks on the door.
Bob watches from a twisted grotto of branches. No one answers. Case looks back in his direction. There is a muscle-tightening pause as she knocks again.
Bob can feel the tension climbing up his neck. Jesus Christ, he’s been here before. Back on Via Princessa. Waiting for an answer to a knock that didn’t come.
He notices the old lady had made a return appearance and is now working the trailer windows. A church-owl of a face aiming right at the front door of the double-wide.
“Get your fuckin’ face back inside, you …”
Case is still eyeing the dead silent fake-wood door. Enough with bullshit civility. She reaches for the doorknob. Everything from her stomach down through her ass turns to jelly.
Screw this up, girl, she thinks, and you’ll end up some sewer cocktail making your way through the city’s drainpipes out to the sea. Just something some innocuous swimmer off the coast of Encinitas will get a face full of, in the quiet Sunday morning surf.
Bob sees the door open, and his eyes go back to that nervous speckled face inside her kitchen.
“Don’t do it, Case,” he whispers. He tries to wave to her. “Not with the bitch eyeballing you like that.”
He stands and tries to get Case’s attention. But in one cursed breath, she’s in. In, and the old lady’s heart-shaped face is staring at the green double-wide. She turns and glances at the telephone.
Bob feels the air whistle out of him. No, not this time. He does not need some “concerned citizen.” Not this time.
He sees her take those first steps to the phone.
He curses silently. Don’t touch that fuckin’ phone … Don’t …
She lifts the receiver.
He is shocked at the moment inside him. You can’t have it both ways.
She begins to dial.
Maybe she’ll have a heart attack right now. Nothing serious, just a little slammer to slow her down.
No such luck.
The living room is a vacant stand of furniture. Case did a couple of tours of duty in this place, and a few rancid memories come back. She leans against the dark where the wall is and listens. There is not a sound except that music coming from a back room.
She starts a slow course in that direction. Her hand down on the pistol hidden under her shirt in her jeans, following the lamplight, following the shadowy breakers beyond that.
She comes toward the music, toward a maze of short halls. She can feel the bass line from the speakers pound up through the floorboards. She’s getting ready to put on her best shuck and jive for whoever might be home. Then, coming around a corner and into a bedroom that once was hers, she spots a naked piece of manhood lying on a red corduroy couch.
He’s twenty, maybe twenty-five. Over six-foot-three. His body is covered with the hand art of some skin wizard. He’s got coarse red hair and nipple rings, and the tip of his penis has been pierced. A diamond stud sparkles against pink skin. His eyes are closed.
No Cyrus, though. No Lena. None of the old rat pack. Just some new boy on the block. She notices a hash pipe and a needle on the carpet beside the couch, with all the necessary jewels around it for a good high.
She can’t help but check the boy out. He’s the type she used to do a lot of fifteen minutes with.
She looks around the room for some sign of the girl, though she’s not quite sure what exactly that might be.
“Am I dead?”
She turns and looks at the boy, who is now lying there with his eyelids half open. “I don’t know,” says Case. “Can you have a hard-on when you’re dead?”
He moves a little. “If I was dead, you might be an angel. I would like to fuck an angel. But if I’m not dead …”
Case eyes him slyly, putting together the pieces of a play. “You’d fuck whatever’s left, r
ight? Let me give you a hint, alright? Leave the talking up to that cock of yours.”
Bob is counting the clock. Five minutes went by twenty minutes ago. And what he gets for his worry is the slow crawl of a police cruiser turtling up the dirt access road toward the old bitch’s trailer. He’s got to start working on his options now. Got to either try getting Case out of there or let her go down and deal with it later.
The old lady isn’t out the front door a heartbeat before she’s harping away. She’s got that nosy paranoid sense of dire urgency, something every cop fears but knows he better deal with if he doesn’t want to face some charge of dereliction of duty.
By the time the cops start for the green double-wide, Bob is running back to the pickup, his arms caning at the high grass. He takes off his money belt and slips it under the front seat. He grabs a shotgun and shells and heads back toward the trailer park, toward that runny well of light.
He makes his way past the garbage cans behind the old lady’s trailer, looking for a soft spot in the dark he can curl into. He gets a back-row seat nested behind some wild brush for the cops’ slow approach on the green double-wide.
The loud knock cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is, and there has to be a voice coming back from inside because one of the policemen answers. Then everything is a collision of cross-purposes and bad timing.
Bob sees some jerk-off kid, a tall buck with red hair, come crashing out the back window with nothing on but black leathers, leaving a comet trail of broken glass behind him. The old lady goes psycho right there in the middle of the street. This bony thing with a boom box for a mouth starts running as one of the cops rams the front door. His partner leaps the sundeck railing and kangaroos down the slippery side of a dirt garden. In the section of bedroom framed by the broken window, Bob sees Case scrambling to get her clothes on, scrambling to get her pistol. What the hell is she doing jackass naked?
It’s all fugitive madness. He hears a cop yell “Halt!” and fire a warning shot into the air. The old lady goes down into the gravel like some pissant sinner at a tent meeting. The front door is hammered in by a blue shoulder. Every one of Bob’s plans to get Gabi back is heading for the scrap heap.